Pavement Quotes - Page 2

• What do you mean fainted? Took a dive, kissed the pavement. Swooned like a southern belle after her first kiss. Had a dreadful case of the vapors.

  Ilona Andrews

  Mean, Kissing, Southern

  Ilona Andrews (2011). “Magic Slays”, p.32, Penguin

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• The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

  Wendell Berry

  Dream, Soil, Forests

  Wendell Berry (2006). “Given: Poems”, p.4, Counterpoint

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• And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

  Virginia Woolf

  Horse, Men, Hair

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.779, Wordsworth Editions

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• Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Fall, Men, Doe

  Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Carlyle (1904). “New letters of Thomas Carlyle”

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• ...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.

  Bruno Schulz

  Fire, Two, Piano

  Bruno Schulz (1963). “Cinnamon Shops: And Other Stories”

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• In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal.

  Willis R. Whitney

  Knowledge, Civilization, Way

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• Nothing's gonna change the world, nothing's gonna change the world. There was Lennon and a happy gun, there were words on the pavement.

  Marilyn Manson

  Gun, World, Lennon

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• There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than
  one rooted in pavements.

  Aldo Leopold

  Doubt, Soil, Rooted

  Aldo Leopold, Susan Flader, J. Baird Callicott (1991). “The river of the mother of God and other essays”, Univ of Wisconsin Pr

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• I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

  Bob Dylan

  Rocks, Missing, Done

  Bob Dylan (2004). “Chronicles: Volume One”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

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• And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

  Lauren Oliver

  Might, Sun, Hundred

  Lauren Oliver (2015). “Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem”, p.137, Hachette UK

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• The shops in High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I'm outside Ajay's newsagent's. I'm on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I'm massive on Handie's furniture shop, King's Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Cafe. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I've possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.

  Jenny Downham

  Kings, Sleep, Circles

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• Long strands of drool stretched from between his fangs and dripped on the pavement, sending a heady scent of jasmine to swirl through the air. Perfumed monster spit. What was the world coming to?

  Ilona Andrews

  Air, Long, Monsters

  Ilona Andrews (2009). “Magic Strikes”, p.73, Penguin

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• There is evil! It's actual, like cement. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. Evil is not a view ... it's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.

  Philip K. Dick

  Believe, Heart, Views

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Wall, Rain

  Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Edwin Drood and Miscellaneous”, p.5, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

  Penelope Lively

  Block, Grief, Eye

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.58, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Civilization, Feet, Illusion

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.396, Faber & Faber

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• She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Art, Stars, Wall

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• Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

  Allen Ginsberg

  Reading, Eye, Winter

  Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish, Part I”

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• Leaves covered pavement like soggy cereal.

  Patricia Cornwell

  Cereal, Covered

  Patricia Cornwell (2010). “The Body Farm: Scarpetta 5”, p.224, Simon and Schuster

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• When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be

  D. H. Lawrence

  Stars, Flames, People

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.4233, Delphi Classics

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• I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

  Virginia Woolf

  Feet, Long, Broken

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.176, Virginia Woolf

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• When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

  David Mitchell

  London, Rooms, Firsts

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.44, Random House

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• For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.

  David Nicholls

  Night, Phones, Years

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• I believe that evidence shows that there is a real spirit, a real Beach, but it is beneath no pavement whatsoever, for all pavements arise within it: Spirit is all-encompassing. It transcends everything, it includes everything.

  Ken Wilber

  Beach, Real, Believe

  Ken Wilber (2004). “The Simple Feeling of Being: Visionary, Spiritual, and Poetic Writings”, p.104, Shambhala Publications

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• You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Self, Tree, Together

  Nell Freudenberger (2012). “The Newlyweds”, p.207, Vintage

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